Heritage Language Maintenance

What is a heritage language?

How is a heritage language learner different from a second language learner?

Why does it matter?

What is the purpose of this project?

The visualizations below are intended to convey information about enrollment trends in higher education institutions for non-English language courses in the United States. The data used was gathered from a Modern Language Association national survey implemented periodically between 1958 and 2016 which gathers information about each individual institution, including languages offered, enrollment numbers, institution type, geographic information, history of the institution’s name, and accreditation.

The reason I chose this particular dataset, which does not highlight information about heritage language programs is mainly because that data does not exist on this level. Existing research and existing heritage language programs are limited and suffer a significant challenge in obscurity. Higher education institutions that do opt to offer heritage language courses often house them within larger modern language departments as a series of courses taken before moving into advanced language courses with second-language learners, which can significantly limit potential enrollment and interest. How do you pursue a program you don’t even know exists?

This presents a few problems. Firstly, we don’t have a real idea of how many institutions currently offer any type of heritage language support system(s). Secondly, even when they are present, we don’t have an idea of how often they’re utilized, what kind of interest they generate among students, what the major goals and interests of current programs are, and what characterizes current heritage language pedagogical practices outside of limited case studies that are not generalizable on their own.

The hope is that this data offers a starting point. Though we can’t make any inferences about heritage learners specifically, what we can understand looking at these enrollment trends are which languages are already showing stable or growing trends enough so that adding additional support systems could be more easily justifiable and implementable. It shows us which geographic areas in the country show significantly higher language learning trends as a way to approach a given area for closer scrutiny. Taking into account the limitations of this data, any sweeping generalizations about the types of programs that should or should not be implemented is not a responsible claim to make. Rather, what this data shows us is a starting point from which to argue for further data collection that can help us understand a given institution’s language program needs as reflected by student utilization and motivation. I would argue one potential avenue for research this makes room for is characterizing the student data gathered for potential recruitment efforts. Another would be cross-institutional collaboration between language departments and other departments to create course offerings that supplement student learning in other areas through non-English languages.

[move this somewhere else] As it relates to the topic of Spanish HLPs, the data is optimistic as it shows that further research into Spanish language programs is not unfounded as SC accounts for such a large portion of LCs.

Proposal 1:

For this visualization I am highlighting enrollment trends for non-English language courses in higher education institutions. The visualization displays a combined total across all surveyed U.S. institutions, including public and private 2-year and 4-year institutions. The top 10 languages for each survey year were ranked, and the aim was to provide an animation that showed how those relationships changed over time, while also emphasizing very clearly how Spanish has, and continues, to dominate enrollment numbers, as Spanish heritage language programs are my specific area of focus.

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Proposal 2:

For this visualization I aim to create an interactive US map to present current differences in language program enrollment by geographic area. I’d like to incorporate more detailed information when hovering over a given area but am worried this may be at odds with simplifying the information given to the audience. I may decide later on to move in a different direction in order to keep information manageable.

From proposal: My starting point for presenting information about institution type will be a simple, but clean, stacked density plot or histogram. One idea I have for presenting changes across time is to create several plots that can be navigated between using a tab that specifies the year.

An alternate idea is to incorporate bubble charts, or a moving bubble graph, which would pull central information about all language enrollment into smaller clusters based on institution or degree type. As in my thinking about presenting geographic information, I am torn here balancing interactivity/fun factor and focus. Below is the simple line graph previously created with the data. One thing I wanted to point out with it is that I wasn’t able to present the data how I wanted—as a way to contrast institution type that shows the proportion compared to total enrollment, rather than simply presenting the number of individuals enrolled. Figuring out how to present the information in that manner will be a big consideration in the final product.